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The first annual volume of Research in Organization Change and Development was published in 1987. Since then, ROCD has provided a special platform for scholars and practitioners to share new research-based insights.

This paper aims to postulate an emerging unified cultural‐convergence framework to converge the delivery of instructional technology and intercultural education (ICE) that extends beyond web‐learning technologies to inculcate inclusive pedagogy in teacher education.

The paper explores the literature and a tech‐infused multicultural learning community to identify what a unified cultural‐convergence theory might consist of and how it could be shaped to align instructional technology and critical ICE in teacher education. Four questions are asked: What key learning do these two disciplines make available to teachers and educators that are essential for today's highly diverse, complex classrooms? What can we draw from a convergence of multiculturalism and global education that will help us derive a new theoretical understanding of a unified cultural‐convergence theory to connect IT and ICE education? What knowledge, skills and dispositions comprise three essential components of this literature synthesis? How can this new unified cultural‐convergence theory and relevant components be taught, practiced, and measured? The paper contains several tables, figures and over 50 sources in the research bibliography that were selected from a review and analysis of 100 documents.

The paper discovered instructional technology and intercultural educators employed web‐learning technologies in very similar ways to position critical ICE strategies into programs or courses in teacher education. The learning technologies models that were attempting to support multicultural education (MCE)/ICE and IT education included corporate, universities, research centers, schools, and government partners. Reportedly, according to the research, teacher educators in IT education do not employ instructional technology practices that differ from practices that are needed or valued by MCE educators to merge critical intercultural structures into teacher education through web‐learning technologies. This was good news as the researcher moves toward a recommendation for a research agenda that could be shared by educators from the two groups.

The paper is limited to literature reviews, reports, and evaluation documents.

The paper offers implications for curriculum development in educational technology and MCE using ICTs

This paper is a commentary on “The effectiveness of psychodynamic interventions for people with learning disabilities: a systematic review” by Chris James and James Stacey. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the thesis that standardised ways of evaluating health care interventions may have the inadvertent effect of undermining the case that people with intellectual disabilities should be offered the same opportunities to address their emotional and mental health difficulties as other citizens.

The commentary argues that while the evidence base focuses on the outcomes of orthodox one-to-one interventions, sometimes broader “contextual reformulation” and systemic interventions are called for. However, family- or service-based interventions tend not to feature in studies.

The commentary illustrates these issues by discussing two case studies, which demonstrate how relational issues tend to be unhelpfully focused on the person with intellectual disabilities to the detriment of family members or direct care staff, who may be struggling to make sense of the person's behaviour or distress.

The commentary supports the argument put forward in the longer paper and also argues for mental health services to be offered on a non-discriminatory basis to people with intellectual disabilities and to their family members. But it also suggests that one of the additional impacts of service level psychotherapeutic interventions is to re-establish respect for the work of direct care staff whose work is often presented as if it is little more than domestic drudgery when in fact it involves negotiating and responding to people and their issues with great sensitivity and balance.

This chapter seeks to make the case that emotions are central in organising in schools and that the way members of staff oversee their emotion processes is crucial to the legitimacy of the institution. The logic of the case is simple, as follows. There are three forms of affect: feelings, moods and emotions. Feelings and moods are affective states, the description of which depicts our inner world. Emotions are very different. They entail a process in which an event of some kind is experienced and appraised. This appraisal results in physiological responses, psychological changes and social responses, which entail actions. The emotion process creates a state of action readiness and a motivation to act. The actions are manifestations of power and they may influence those who experience them. Because actions influence, they are leadership actions and are therefore central to organising processes. Actions may have a high affective content and may be experienced as an individual ‘emoting’, which typically increases the significance of the action experienced by others. Emoting can therefore change the influencing effect of an action. We may seek to defend ourselves from actions with a high affective content by means of social defences, which can take various forms. The social actions resulting from the emotion process and emoting are subject to a whole range of ‘rules’: personal, interpersonal, institutional and cultural. How well members of the school staff understand and oversee – manage – that emotion process in relation to these rules is crucial to the legitimacy of schools as institutions.

The challenge of sustaining growth seems to be getting steeper and steeper. This Masterclass provides context for two recent books that have valuable insights to offer to company leaders and strategists on how to build resilience and sustain growth in increasingly dynamic and uncertain global competitive markets.

In The Founder’s Mentality: How to Overcome the Predictable Crises of Growth (2016), well-known Bain strategy consultants, Chris Zook and James Allen offer a strategy for consciously embedding “the founder’s mentality” into the culture of young firms as they scale or rediscovering it in mature firms that might be stalling and losing their way. For strategy and innovation guru, Vijay Govindarajan, sustaining growth increasingly requires being able to pursue simultaneously two very different types of activity and mindset – exploiting a legacy business while exploring new business opportunities. He offers a very practical framework for approaching this challenge in The Three Box Solution: A Strategy for Leading Innovation.

The “founder’s mentality” refers to “a collection of specific behaviors and attitudes best exemplified by the traits of great founders that if properly cultivated in the rest of the organization, can lead more reliably to sustainable growth.” Some young firms fail to establish a founder’s mentality from the outset, while many mature founder-led companies come to lose their sense of insurgency and other key founder’s mentality traits over time. “Just about every company, at any stage in its life, can benefit from the attitudes and behaviors that make up the founder’s mentality.”

Govindarajan argues that “asking what assumptions must be true for this idea to be highly profitable” and testing the most critical of these “as early and as inexpensively as possible” is ‘the best way to reveal an ill-conceived project.

The two books, taken together, provide a wealth of insight for leaders seeking to diagnose their firm’s growth problems and looking for potential solutions for reviving innovation and growth.

The tempting luster of new business ideas has led many executives to take their eyes off the basics of positioning, and instead undertake seemingly inspired initiatives that eventually destroy value. This “Masterclass” aims to put attention back on the fundamentals of strategic positioning by analyzing how the insights in four recent books are complementary.

The Masterclass identifies a classic formula for strategic success – focus, alignment, repeatability and leadership. The featured readings that support the formula are: Understanding Michael Porter – The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy by Joan Magretta; Repeatability – Building Enduring Businesses for a World of Constant Change by Chris Zook and James Allen; The Strategist – Be the Leader Your Business Needs by Cynthia A. Montgomery; and The IKEA Edge – Building Global Growth and Social Good at the World's Most Iconic Home Store by Anders Dahlvig.

Effective strategic positioning must be both economically convincing and emotionally compelling so leaders can communicate it throughout the organization in a way that is clear, energizing and empowering. The leader makes a difference by infusing a company's positioning with a strong sense of purpose, refocusing the organization when it starts to stray off track and repositioning it when its original positioning has run its course.

A key lesson is the value of repeatability. Most companies that sustained a modest level of profitable growth over the last decade have done it by replicating an easily recognizable model that recreates their strongest strategic advantage in new contexts. The virtue of such an approach lies in the way that it turns the sources of differentiation into routines, behaviors and activity systems that everyone in the organization can understand and follow.

Managers will appreciate this insightful back‐to‐basics approach that both simplifies their choices and expands their opportunities.

Herbert Morris and Hydrovane outwardly have little in common. One is a long established cranemaker which five years ago faced a bleak future. The other is a relative newcomer to the compressor business, with a continuous growth and profit record. Yet they — and countless other companies in the UK — share the same management determination to keep industry alive and kicking in the face of current adversity. Reports by Ken Gooding and Chris Phillips.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how knowledge inflows and outflows interact to affect performance outcomes. Though previous studies have dealt with knowledge inflows and outflows, the quality and quantity characteristics of knowledge are often not taken into account, thus leaving a research gap with regards to the effect of their interactions on performance outcomes.

Based on Poisson regression analysis, this quantitative study fills the aforementioned research gaps by analyzing the ambidextrous configurations of knowledge flows from an ambidexterity perspective and examines their effects on two-phase performance (i.e. regular season and playoffs), using a longitudinal data set of National Basketball Association transactions from the 2003-2004 to 2014-2015 season.

The results suggest that the complementarity between knowledge inflows and outflows along the quality and quantity dimensions of knowledge, respectively, has a positive impact on two-phase performance, while the imbalance between knowledge inflows and outflows under the quality and quantity dimensions of knowledge, respectively, has a negative impact on playoffs performance (Phase 2). These findings suggest that organizations can balance knowledge inflows and outflows under a single quality or quantity dimension of knowledge. Furthermore, the interaction between the quantity of the inflows of knowledge and the quality of the outflows of knowledge and the interaction between the quality of the inflows of knowledge and the quantity of the outflows of knowledge are both positively related to two-phase performance. These findings suggest that organizations can balance knowledge inflows and outflows across quality and quantity dimensions of knowledge. Finally, the effects of the interaction between knowledge inflows and outflows on playoffs performance are greater than regular-season.

Organizations should leverage ambidexterity to manage/balance knowledge inflows and outflows across quality and quantity dimensions, further enhancing performance outcomes.

This study, first, provides new insights into knowledge flows by distinguishing between the quality and quantity of knowledge, the inflows and outflows of knowledge, constructing ambidextrous configurations of knowledge flows from an ambidexterity perspective. Second, it contributes to the relationship between knowledge flows and organizational performance by revealing how ambidextrous configurations of knowledge flows exert different effects on performance outcomes. Third, it adds to the literature of ambidexterity-performance relationships and expands it to the context of sports.

Purpose – This is an examination of how border policies become intertwined with patriotic expressions that result in an atmosphere conducive to border vigilantism. We analyze how vigilantes target sources of immigrant employment, demonstrate at public buildings in attempting to put pressure on public officials, and speak and rally at educational institutions in order to disseminate their message.

Methodology – We use content analysis, broadly defined.

Findings – Brutalization theory helps understand how a militarized border policy shapes an environment in which violence becomes an acceptable and appropriate response to undocumented migration.

Value – This chapter provides insights on both recent vigilante activities along the border and also within the interior of the nation.